The Wise Virgins (1914), Leonard Woolf's second novel, was published two years after the author's marriage to Virginia Stephen--and begun during their honeymoon. The autobiographical elements of the book are well documented. Its publication caused acute distress to Woolf's family. Leonard's sister, Bella, urged him to bury the novel, while his mother was shocked and mortified by unflattering portraits of herself and her neighbors. Two weeks after reading the novel, Virginia Woolf suffered the worst of her many breakdowns.

As a roman a clef the novel holds considerable...

In this richly detailed biography, Victoria Glendinning brings alive the great Anglo-Irish novelist whose literary achievements were equaled only by her unbounded gift for living. Taking us from Elizabeth Bowen's ancestral home in Ireland, Bowen s Court, to Oxford where she met Yeats and Eliot, to her service as an air-raid warden in London during World War II, this penetrating biography lifts the thin veil between Bowen's imaginative world and the complex emotional life that fired her shimmering novels. We see her at elegant parties, where such friends as Virginia Woolf, Eudora Welty, and...

This meticulously researched and compassionately rendered portrait of Leonard Woolf, the "dark star" of Bloomsbury, is the first to capture his troubled relationship with his wife, his own intellect, and the tumultuous world of artists and eccentrics around him. A man of extremes, Woolf was by turns ferocious and tender, violent and repressed, opinionated and nonjudgmental, always an outsider of sorts within the exceptionally intimate, fractious, and sometimes vicious society of brilliant but troubled friends and lovers. In telling Woolf's story, Victoria Glendinning traces the development of...

Provides a woman's view of Anthony Trollope, placing emphasis on family, particularly on his relationship with his mother.

Two young women come of age in a novel "unbelievably rich in character, incident, and observation." -- The Boston Globe
Their childhood and adolescence were overshadowed by the Great War. Now, in its lonely aftermath, Rose and Mary Aubrey find themselves deprived of the guiding strength of their cousin Rosamund when she marries a man of dubious morals and intolerable vulgarity. Retreating to an inn on the Thames, they find a haven of security with old friends.
Into this fragile Eden a new, disruptive force is introduced; Rose discovers the power of love, and, confronting her...